Jimquisition: A-LIE-ns: Colonial Marines

[Prosis]

This is worrisome. Everybody knows that trailers don't indicate what the game will be like when it comes out.

But now, pre-release gameplay doesn't indicate what the game will be like.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

It's just staggering the audacity Gearbox had to pull this bullshit. They make an awesome looking demo... and then completely disregard everything they put into the awesome looking demo and made a shitty game. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that WAS just prerendered bullshit because otherwise I'd have to swallow that Gearbox just threw away perfectly good gameplay and replaced it with complete shit for absolutely no reason. Which makes the demo a total scam, intentionally trying to pass off a prerendered CG movie as gameplay to falsely advertise a shitty product.

In one masterstroke, Gearbox have managed to throw away EVERY scrap of respect I had for them, earned from Half Life: Opposing Force, Borderlands and even having the courage to TRY and save Duke Nukem Forever (even if that failed horribly). To just have the NERVE to try and pull this garbage is just outright sleazy.

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

If the multiplayer was anywhere near the AVP from 1999 I would buy it only for that, fuck single player.

That or AVP2 would be fine with me. I'd absolutely get it just for multiplayer like that, and I hardly play competitive FPSes anymore. I have fond lanparty memories of different races as separate teams in separate rooms with open doors between them, so you could talk quietly to the people next to you and then yell at the people across the hall when you ate their face off after hiding above a doorway they didn't bother checking on their way through. I wasn't actually good at the games, but they were just so much fun to be mediocre at. Heh.

 

[MortisLegio]

It's like they released an Alpha build of the game on accident, wtf.

That would at least explain the inconsistencies. Maybe, if you bought the game, you'll get the actual game by mail or something.

OT: I am a huge Alien fan and fan of Colonial Marines (the group not the game). I preordered because of that 10 minute demo thinking "If this is the Demo, then the full game will be awesome." I preordered the collector's edition, paid in full, and patiently waited for the game to be released. Sadly, like so many things, it failed to live up to even the smallest of expectations. The story is horrible (even if it was fan fiction), the visuals are extremely low quality, the animations (I'm an animator, so this is a big one for me) wouldn't have passed in my Advanced class, the characters are boring and unlikable, and ...

Spoiler: for a good percentage of the time

you fight Wayland-Yutani mercs instead of the aliens

I am very disappointed with Gearbox on this one. I will never preorder a game ever again.

 

[emissary666]

Well, this has put a dent in my enjoyment of the game. I bought it this morning and just finished my however many hours long session. If you don't have any expectations going into the game other than, "This is a game about the United States Colonial Marines", then it is actually a relatively enjoyable game; this is ruined by having a demo which, admittedly, looks way better than the game and now makes what was a passible game into a slightly disappointing experience.
Also, to be fair, somethings in the trailer that weren't in the game aren't necessarily too surprising. The weapons table is clearly meant to present the player with a pretty display of the weapons and the third-person turret placement just seems out of place for a game that is otherwise entirely first person. Too bad the graphics and AI don't match the trailer.

 

[kburns10]

This is nuts. Gearbox will have to address this in the coming weeks with the amount of bad press this is getting. I feel sorry for people who pre-ordered and something of good will should at least be extended to them. Honestly, this is one of the worst bait-and-switch jobs I've seen in awhile.

 

[Darks63]

Is it possible for he pc version to mod out alot of the issues with this game or is it not mod friendly enough?

 

[Nurb]

So does the obvious lie about the product count as false advertizing? Customers should be able to get their money back. No other industry would allow "Hey, buy this awesome looking product!... JUST KIDDNG LOL NO REFUNDS!"

It's deliberately misleading the customer.

 

[carlh267]

So does the obvious lie about the product count as false advertizing? Customers should be able to get their money back. No other industry would allow "Hey, buy this awesome looking product!... JUST KIDDNG LOL NO REFUNDS!"

It's deliberately misleading the customer.

Unfortunately, the disclaimer that stuff in demos on youtube may not being necessarily representative of the final product shields developers from being sued for false advertising in cases like this, as far as I'm aware. It isn't necessarily bad, because things do end up changing between beta and release, but the sheer amount of stuff in this video that didn't make it into the final product is just mind-boggling.

Unfortunately, in situations like this, the only way to punish the developers for releasing a broken game is simply not to buy products from them in the future until they shape up.

 

[Britisheagle]

I remember seeing this and being so psyched for the game that I preordered it. The more I saw, although it didn't live up to the atmosphere of this demo, still appealed to me.

I actually even looked forward to the whole over the top badass thing, I really thought that would add to the game and give the marines more character, but no. So disappointed.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I actually thought that demo looked awesome. Shame they didn't actually do all that work in the finished product.

 

[bananafishtoday]

Wow. I'd never seen this demo before, so reading all the Aliens reviews was just gleeful "Hehehe what a terrible game" enjoyment. But seeing this... now I'm sad. The game that this demo pretends to be would have been amazing.

 

[triggrhappy94]

You keep saying that the AI was good in the demo, but all I say were aliens running head-long into gun fire 99% of the time. I realize that a flanking AI wouldn't work in the confined spaces of the latter half of the demo, but that would create an interesting juxaposition: you finally think you have the upper hand with a turret and a narrow hallway, then you get flanked again. It would have been great.
Even the wolves in Skyrim have flanking in their path finding, and that's a TES game.

 

[itsthesheppy]

I always feel saddest for the developers who worked so hard on the game, who didn't have any say in the design and yet slaved away on it all the same, only watch it flop limply out onto the stage and die, twitching, in front of an audience booing it into submission.

 

[Carnagath]

I don't blame Gearbox entirely for this. I guess it's a real clusterfuck when you are a medium-sized studio with a lot of simultaneous projects, more than you can handle in any realistic timeframe, and you've got a publisher threatening to sue you to the ground if you don't hurry the fuck up, cause you've taken 6 years already... They did some of the work, they outsourced some, they thought it was gonna work, it didn't, and Sega just released it. Gearbox really should focus on fewer projects that can get the level of attention that they want (because I guess that NO developer wants to release a game that sucks). It was bad time management on their part. I don't blame them for the demo either, it was quite some time ago, it's not like they released a demo that looked and played like that a week before the game and lied to everyone, the game probably WOULD be like that if they had more time, but then you can't expect a publisher to wait 8 years for a game because a studio put too much on their plate. I guess there's a reason the term "development hell" exists.

 

[Antari]

Am I even remotely shocked that this happened when EA was involved? Nope. The scam continues ...

 

[gundamrx101]

Isnt this fraud?

This is fraud. Right?

No cause it's a demo they can cover their arse with the fact that it was a demo that it is not representative of the final product.

I wasn't really watching this game, but with it being an FPS and an Aliens title had it been decent I would have bought it. I waited a few hours after release to find out what the opinion was and when I read some of the early reviews I am glad I didn't pre order. The thing is the more I see of the demo and the build up 'gameplay' videos vs the final product the more tragic this gets.

Just remember these are the folk that gave us Borderlands 2... how the hell did they make such a mess of this game?

It wasn't so much a demo, as a vertical slice. I'm not too keen on that term. I do know, however, at the end of the video; Randy Pitchford claims what we just watched was taken from act 2 of the game.

 

[Undeadpool]

I played this for around 30 minutes and put it down (am in the process of sending it back to Gamefly, in fact). The part that broke me was the first time you're exposed to a chest burster. It rips is way through a marine and, I kid you not, AS this was happening, a tutorial pop-up, that DIDN'T PAUSE THE GAME, popped up, telling me how to switch weapons. This piece of information was completely irrelevant for the time. And that was where I stopped.

I am a man who has beaten Alpha Protocol THREE TIMES, and I couldn't get through an hour of this craplousy game.

 

[Cabamacadaf]

This reminds me a lot of what happened with Halo 2.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Loo, no offense, but as much as A:CM is a turd of a game, I don't think you can get to worked up about the demo shown being different from the final game. That isn't something particular to CM, it happens to loads of games.

Demos typically are build during early builds of the game they come from.. Now, it's worth remembering that games are software. They are liable to be upgraded as they go, which can lead to drastic changes. That's just the way it goes. As game code gets rewritten and upgraded, the nature of the game and the mechanics within change as well.

The most notable example of this I can think of is the Halo 2 E3 demo. If CM's demo is a lie, then Halo 2's demo is the con of the fucking century.


None of what happens in the above video happens in the final game. The New Mombassa levels are designed and scripted completely differently, the weapons have different functionality, the enemies even bleed in a different way.

Does that mean Bungie committed high level fraud with the demo? No. It just means that game development progressed to a point that they felt the Mombassa stuff needed to be reworked in order to better mesh. It happens, and developers shouldn't be forced to keep early build stuff if they feel it's old and outdated.

Just because sequences happen in a different order in the A:CM demo, or sequences were omitted in the final game, that's not what makes it a bad game. What makes it a bad game is the glitchy animations, dumb AI and pretty poor gameplay.

I don't think you can even really single out the visuals in the demo as being a 'lie'. At least, not without holding the rest of the game industry responsible for perpetuating the same lie. When games are demoed, even 360 and PS3 exclusives, they're generally demo'd on high-end developer PCs which run them at a much higher fidelity than consumers could ever hope to experience. Killzone 2 is possibly the UR-example of this, but it's far from the only one. When Watch Dogs comes out, you can bet your sweet ass that it's not going to look like the version Ubisoft showed off at E3 last year. That's just how it goes. Developers and publishers like about visuals all the time. That's something you just have to get used to as a gamer, and try and spot bullshit when it happens. Those Halo 4 screenshots Microsoft was releasing before the game's release? Complete bullshit. They were captured at a resolution the 360 could never hope to match. Battlefield 3? Again, total bullshit. The 360 version didn't have anywhere near the graphical fidelity they claimed it would.

The industry is full of bullshitters when it comes to graphics. This isn't something you can pin on Gearbox alone.

First off, kudos for beating me to the punch. I was shaking my head bemusedly at all the comments claiming this ploy is new somehow to the gaming industry. I thought to myself, "have they forgotten Halo 2 already?"

Second, it's my understanding that Microsoft twisted Bungie's arm to come up with a gameplay demo in time for E3, even though they hadn't really hammered out a playable version of the game yet. They resorted to utilizing a game engine they knew would never work for the final product given the limitations of the Xbox hardware.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bungie-halo-2-e3-demo-was-a-fake

Third, while I agree with you that it's practically an industry standard, I still think it needs to be changed. There needs to be a little more accountability to prevent or mitigate such misleading practices. Even something as minor as an extra little disclaimer beforehand ("we reserve the right to change anything and everything in the final product") or keeping gamers more in the loop on new developments ("You know that level we showcased? We went back and scrapped it.") would be a step in the right direction.

Finally...ugh...watching that demo...it brings back painful memories. I was still a teenager at the time, and I hadn't quite learned not to believe everything the hype machine claims. You can imagine my feelings of disappointment and betrayal when I got my hands on the finished game. It STILL hurts watching the demo today. I still contend that the demo looks a hell of a lot cooler than the final product.

If nothing else though, Halo 2 taught me a valuable life lesson: always question marketing. For what it's worth, I still had fun playing the game, but I'll never forget what I saw back in 2003.